Twitter buys influence measuring features with BackType acquisition

Twitter has always been in the hit list and always buzzed of about its tweets. News has recently hit that twitter is buying BackType which is a social media analysis company. As clear from a blog post, the purchase of BackType exemplifies two major trends at Twitter.

Firstly, Twitter continues to collect features offered by third party in its direct control. Recently, renowned Twitter client app Tweetdeck was acquired by the microblogging service. It added another amazing feature which was the addition of picture sharing to its feature set. Such actions would perhaps eliminate the need of third party services for Twitter users to do what they want to do on or with Twitter.

Second thing is to highlight the increasing value of determining social influence. The premiere service of BackType told its customers the way tweets about them were propagating through Twitter and who were the most influential people on Twitter for a topic or company. Information like this is money making for a big social company like Twitter. This is also of great help for marketers who are looking in a social sphere like Twitter, Facebook or any other company for people who are important to them.

The reason of Twitter buying BackType Company is apparently BackType’s core technology specifically its Storm feature which is known to process the firehouse of Twitter data in real time. The terms of this deal isn’t revealed but as per the blogs BackType will discontinue BackType product and API services. Users can expect the measurement and tracking services will be still under Twitter. Moreover BackTweets which is a free Twitter analysis which will available only for current users but not for new customers.

Now when Google has successfully launched its social network, Google+, acquisition of BackType by Twitter is certainly a great step. Everyone can wait and see the shift of mad rush for users of social network (where Facebook is dominant) to a battle of influence. Owning a company that can measure influence, social network company can help users to become more influential. This kind of influence is what marketers look and pay for. Twitter would now be able to make more money using this BackType’s technology and engineers. This would be wrong to say that this social company, Twitter, has taken a great step in making money at the time when many companies are taking measures to give competition to existing ones.